A Review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, by Scott Smith

Oprah has announced her newest book club pick -- it's The Road, by National Book Award winning author Cormac McCarthy. Here is a review from Scott Smith, author of The Ruins. 

An Irresistible Journey: A Review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road
By Scott Smith

Admirers of Cormac McCarthy will find themselves in reassuringly familiar territory with his new book, The Road. The setting may have shifted away from the West of the Border Trilogy and No Country for Old Men, but the tale retains McCarthy's invigoratingly austere worldview. A father and son move together through a post-apocalyptic landscape, passing burnt forests and immolated cities along the road of the title, while a bitter winter descends upon them. Ash covers everything. Daylight is nothing but a gray smudge; night is utterly lightless. And bands of marauders lay in ambush along the way, driven to cannibalism in their desperation.

All this sounds like bleak stuff, I know, and it certainly is. The world is dying, and there's no way to render this honestly without the bodies drying to a husk beside the road, or even the newborn baby we glimpse roasting on a spit. What saves the book from nihilism, though, is the tenderness with which McCarthy treats his two main characters. The love that bonds his father and son affects us all the more deeply for the savagery and inhumanity they encounter as they travel. This is a story of great extremes. There are some truly harrowing scenes of evil in the book, told without fanfare, and then—running in stark counterpoint—come startling gestures of compassion and pity.

And the book feels real, which is perhaps its most impressive accomplishment. Good writing is always about the details, and as usual McCarthy gets everything right. His prose seems to grow leaner with each successive novel. There's still the ornate vocabulary of Blood Meridian and Outer Dark ("discalced," "gambreled," and "gryke" all sent me scrambling for my dictionary), not to mention the hypnotic King James rhythms, but the sentences are largely stripped down here, and the writing remains implacably focused on the external reality of his two characters: the wind and rain, the drifts of ash, the constant quest for food and warmth. This whittling away brings to the forefront one of McCarthy's greatest gifts as a writer: the purity and vigor of his storytelling. While The Road is undeniably a work of high literature, its narrative moves forward with such irresistible momentum that it nonetheless reads like a page turner. Immerse yourself in the first few paragraphs, and that's all it will take; you'll be hooked till the very end.